Beyond the Descent
by FloatingPizza
Summary: Sometimes there's a fine line between fear and longing.


The wind shrieked past his ears, buffeting his body, deafening him, as the airplane shook and spiraled down, the weight of the dead engine drawing it inexorably to earth. His throat burned from the cold high air and the acrid smoke pouring out of the engine and his breath came in short, fear-bewildered gasps. The gray-green earth spun before him in ever-tightening circles, rimmed with the fierce awful blue of the unforgiving sky. He almost heaved from the dizzying blind panic of free fall, but up was down and down was up and his lungs were devoid of breath, and so he fell wordlessly, shaking, the ground reaching up towards him with the inevitability of death.

A sudden wave of desperation seized him and he let go of the stick, slamming his boots down on the left rudder. The airplane shuddered and kept falling, but the spiral became less katabatic and the earth below ceased its mad dance, settling to a single image, a shaking upward surge. He took a harried breath and grabbed hold of the stick, pulling the nose back in an attempt to regain lift. A shock of horror jolted through him as the airplane resumed its death roll, screaming as it fell. Foul smoke billowed into the cockpit, blinding him, and he shoved the stick forward, desperate to reverse the gyration.

Gravity shoved down on his shoulders and the airplane shuddered again, growing hesitant in its descent, falling less like deadweight and more like a wounded bird whose wings half-failed to grasp the air. But the ground was still rushing upwards, and the air was no longer cold in his throat, and past the keening of the wind he could hear the scream of mortars. Roiling fire exploded beneath him, half-obscured by the airplane's wings, and he yanked the stick back, mindlessly. The airplane reared and he suddenly saw the tree line rise before his eyes, higher, higher—

Klink gasped and shot up, chest heaving, heart pounding, fingers twisted in the cotton bedsheets. His eyes darted about the room, pupils dilated from the adrenaline surging through his veins. It was dark, midnight dark, and silent, a far cry from the multi-hued mosaic of his dream. He was shaking, shivering from fear and the clammy sheen of sweat coating his body. He took a shuddering breath, fighting down nausea, and swallowed against the bile in his throat. He gradually became aware of the searchlights filtering in through the windows, the cool scent of rain suffusing the air, and the steady patter of raindrops on the roof.

Klink relaxed his grip on the bedclothes, slowly, and leaned back until his shoulder blades rested against the wooden headboard. He closed his eyes, willing the ghosts away, and exhaled.

 _The spin._ He always dreamt of the spin.

He lay there several minutes, resting, coming back to the present, before an aching stiffness in his bones compelled him to rise. Klink stood up, carefully, and walked to the window, massaging his shoulders as he went. He parted the curtains and looked outside. Raindrops slid down the windowpane, giving the camp the appearance of an oil painting, a study in muted browns and grays interspersed by the glimmer of pale yellow light. The blurred beams of the searchlights swept across the compound with a comforting regularity, glinting off of rain-slick metal and wet mud.

Klink sighed, feeling an odd mixture of nostalgia and faint pride. The camp looked the same as it had all the years of his command, brought slightly closer to beauty by the touch of the rain. His thoughts drifted back to the past, back to his dream, as he stared out at the calm, unchanging night.

When he had volunteered for the air force, he never envisioned himself being shot down on a clear morning. In his mind, if he dared to entertain the thought at all, he pictured the firmament on that day to be a deep, dark gray, shot through with lightning, and strewn with clouds so massive as to rival mountains. Something out of myth. Reality was far sunnier, totally cloudless, and no less terrifying.

The spin had been horrible, catastrophic, and it was a miracle he had walked away from it alive. The air force was so short on pilots at the time that he had been thrust back into the air immediately after his recovery. It wasn't until his return flight, when he found himself psychologically incapable of looking outside of the cockpit, that he had realized, with bone-sapping horror, that as much as he loved flying he feared falling even more.

There came a shift in the shadows outside as a guard on patrol rounded the corner of a barracks, his blurred shape as irregular as an expressionist's brushstrokes. He slouched through the steady downpour and moved out of sight. The rain drummed on.

Klink closed his eyes. It had been twenty-five years, a quarter of a century. Did he, after so many hours and days and months, still feel cascading thrills of horror at the thought of flight?

He let the question sift its way through the seines of his consciousness, through filters of memory and perception, down to the capillaries in his fingertips. He well remembered the anticipation he had once felt on cool early mornings and dusky afternoons, when he had stood on the flight line and listened to the song of the biplanes as they roared to life. There was still a racing of his blood, a quickening of his pulse, that much was certain. The sky still sang to him like a siren, but he had long ago stuffed his ears with the wax of officialdom, and an imperceptible music loses its allure.

He was no ace, no legend, no hero enamored with the heavens, but he had ascended in his own way, slow and painful as it had been. He was comfortable. The war would pass him by. Enemies would never again dive at him out of the sun, pierce his aircraft with bullets, and send him spiraling down to earth. The worst he had to deal with now was Hochstetter, and though death shadowed the man like a portent, the danger was never so immediate as three thousand meters of empty air yawning beneath his feet.

Klink wondered absently if Hogan ever missed flying. Surely he had to. The American was young, still, and he had the sort of personality that took to flight like an addiction. Being grounded must have made imprisonment doubly hard for him.

Klink felt a subtle stab of jealousy at the thought. At least Hogan had something to long for, something beyond safe monotony, a crescent-thin chance of promotion, and the occasional rhapsody of a violin solo. It occurred to Klink that the American had seen Germany from the air far more recently than he had, and he wondered how the landscape had changed, if the cities had sprawled further over the green fields, if the hills still bloomed a thousand colors in the autumn, and if the sunlight still glinted off of the rivers fierce and beautiful enough to blind you...

Feeling an odd tightness in his throat, and growing cold from the chill seeping in through the window, Klink shut the curtains and walked back across the room. He eased himself into bed, feeling the mattress creak under his weight, and pulled the covers tight about himself. There was still a vague anxiety haunting his mind, a fear of terror-stained memories resurfacing, but as he faded back into oblivion, soothed by the rain-music, such apprehensions drifted away.

Some part of him hoped he would dream of flying.


End file.
